Evolvable Hardware

Evolvable hardware (EHW) refers to hardware whose architecture/structure and functions change dynamically and autonomously in order to improve its performance in carrying out tasks. The emergence of this field has been profoundly influenced by the progress in reconfigurable hardware and evolutionary computation. Traditional hardware can be inflexible – the structure and its functions are often impossible to change once it is created. However, most real world problems are not fixed – they change with time. In order to deal with these problems efficiently and effectively, different hardware structures are necessary. EHW provides an ideal approach to make hardware "soft" by adapting the structure to a problem dynamically. The contributions in this book provide the basics of reconfigurable devices so that readers will be fully prepared to understand what EHW is, why it is necessary and how it is designed. The book also discusses the leading research in digital, analog and mechanical EHW.